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Tutorial for Foam Mounting Unmounted Rubber Stamps

It has been a while since I have posted a tutorial so here we go with a tutorial to explain how to take a sheet of unmounted rubber stamps and mount them on to repositionable foam to use them with acrylic blocks.

You Will Need;

A self healing craft mat (Dedicate one to this job as it will get sticky, so you won’t want to use it for other projects.

Retractable Craft Knife

Pot of Cornflour (this reduces the sticky residue)

Wet Wipes; use the ones that do contain alcohol and they will help remove sticky reidue for your blades.

Damp piece of kitchen roll; to remove sticky residue as you work

Unmounted stamps

Sunday International EZ Mount Foam

Sharp Scissors

Method

Trim your sheet of unmounted stamps into individual designs

Trim the individual pieces close to the image/text leaving a 2-3mm boarder. It is vital that all your cuts are made at 90 degress. Both for trimming the image and for cutting the foam, your stamp will not print out correctly if the foam does not fully support the ‘die’ (rubber stamp)

One side of the EZ Mount foam is not sticky. This side will hold your stamp onto the acrylic block by static. You need to place your image on the other side of the foam, which is VERY sticky.

Do not allow any of the sticky surface to come in contact with the image side of your rubber stamp. If you get sticky fingers wipe them to avoid getting adhesive on the front surface of the stamp.

Then gently swipe the blade along the edge of the stamp, cutting into the foam. (This is a left handed image in the picture as I was taking my own pics again) When you do it, keep the stamp directly in front of you, keeping the knife at 90 degrees from the stamp and pull knife towards you.

Keep dipping the knife into the cornflour between cuts to avoid a build up of the adhesive on your blade. If you do get over sticky, use the damp cloth to wipe off the excess glue. Dip in the flour again and continue until you have cut out your image.

Here is the stamp, it is stuck on the EZ Mount, and cut out.

If you find any sticky patches at the side of your finished stamp apply a little cornflour to the edges and the glue should dry off.

With a clean piece of damp cloth wipe your stamps before using them to ensure all the cornflour has been removed.

Use the damp cloth to wipe down everything that may have become sticky during the process. Adhesive can also be removed from the knife blade using the wet wipes that contain alcohol. Caution do not use the wipes on the stamps or any plastic surface, the alcohol in them will damage your plastic and rubber.

I store my unmounted stamps on laminated sheets. You can laminate the sheet that the stamps are supplied on if they show the images that are on the stamps. I have avoided storing my stamps in CD cases, I know this is a popular way to store the stamps but the CD cases are made from a highly acidic plastic and over time this could damage the stamps. As ever it is a personal preference.

Unmounted stamps are a very cost effective way to buy stamps. They are cheaper as they are supplied without any foam or wooden blocks, but they are also much easier to store as they take up MUCH less room than their wood mounted versions.

It is possible to remove stamps from their wood mounts to enable you to ‘convert’ them to this kind of foam and storage. I hope to do an article to explain a method of doing this at a later date.

Best wishes and thanks for reading, as ever if you have any questions leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you.

This has nothing to do with your post (but it’s a cool one). I just wanted to comment about your comment on Suzi’s blog. I also married my best friend and it isn’t lustful or passionate or happy or wonderful or fun or cool all the time. There are some boring parts, some angry parts, some bothered parts, some okay parts, some ho-hum parts, some fighting parts, and some just being parts too. But that’s called relationship. I actually blogged about it not too long ago.

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